I'm delighted to have featured so many conversations with makers dating back to when I started this site.

I am especially delighted that Tara Hunt, someone whose business stamina and persistence I've admired for years, agreed to make the time to answer a few questions about entrepreneurship and Buyosphere, her company and product.

I followed with interest the evolution of Buyosphere and your conversation about life in a startup, which you captured brilliantly here.

In my experience, what you say about learning to understand what to ignore is key to any kind of venture, from free lancing and consulting to working at a corporate job. And I cannot overstate the importance of finding supporters and mentors as well.

(1.) How should we go about seeking mentors? And how do we go about understanding the importance of filtering the feedback we receive?

Tara: I seek out mentors on a daily basis. When there are people I admire, I reach out to start building relationships right away. I don't ask them to be my mentors without building the relationship over a period of time, though.

Many people make that mistake. I get emails all of the time that say, "Hi Tara! I really admire your post/presentation/interview. Will you mentor me?"

My time is limited, so if I don't have a relationship with that person, I don't feel incredibly compelled to answer. But if I know a person for a while and get to understand what she is doing, I'm very likely to want to help.

So, I build relationships and when the time is right and I've given enough to ask (key: what can you offer a person you admire beforehand?), that person you thought would be out of your reach is usually more than happy to support your growth.

As for which feedback to take and which to filter out, that's a tough one that requires a mix of experience, gut instinct and openness to listen.

With Buyosphere, we reminded ourselves not to remain married to the solution, but always keep aligned to the problem we are trying to solve. The problem we are trying to solve is the amount of choice and not enough clear choice in online shopping.

Lots of people try to solve this in lots of different ways. We think it's tapping into the interest graph and crowdsourcing that will be the answer, not algorithms that try to determine taste. People have an inherent sense of taste, computers don't.

In your presentation, you underscore the importance of solving the right problem. The lesson in the story is figuring out a way to iterate faster to keep driving to the parts of the experiment that work.

(2.) How do we get savvier in recognizing when we're solving the right problem?

Tara: The secret is not to be married to the HOW and instead, understand the WHY and WHO of it.

I love that story about the human-powered flying machine. The process itself was broken. It ties nicely into the whole lean startup movement.

When we first set out to solve online shopping, we thought about it like everybody else: solving it with filtering through algorithms. We were focused on the HOW and so was everybody else.

We stepped back to look at the WHY and WHO. Basically how people were trying to get around it already.

That's when I noticed lots of people using the 'lazy web' - asking on Twitter and Facebook. I thought about my own behavior when I've been looking for something. It was so simple it was right in front of us, but we weren't looking for the right answer.

One of your recent posts at the Buyosphere blog underscored the importance of seeking feedback in managing expectations.

This is something that fascinates me because I believe in the power of communication and conversation to help people connect with a product and brand.

(3.) What has been the biggest ah-ha from your experience?

Tara: People will do the work involved (signing up, filling stuff out, taking even hours to carefully craft something) if they know that there will be a fruitful outcome. This happens in a couple of ways:

1. Early adopters use it and get huge benefits and start telling people how beneficial using the product is. Their followers trust their advice and try it and spread the word themselves. (i.e. influencer marketing)

2. The product has a SUPER low barrier to entry so people give it a whirl and enjoy it (i.e. re-pin this - one click interaction)

3. The reward/benefit is clear, apparent and easy to understand, so users will take the time (i.e. fill this out and you'll get free stuff)

We're still trying to drop the barrier to entry enough to keep spammers out while we try to give adopters who are using the product an amazing enough experience to talk about AND trying to communicate the product clearly, showing the benefits.

It's not as straight forward as it sounds!

(4.) Are startups finding operations more important these days? Actually doing business, rather than just flipping brands.

Tara: Well...funding isn't a business model, so we all have to figure out how to build a business while we build a product people love.

Hopefully the two go hand in hand and starting earlier than later is key.

(5.) If you were to share one word of advice with business leaders, what would that word be?

Tara: Go into it thinking that you have no other choice than to make this work. Giving up prematurely is the number one reason for startups failing. ;)

+++

In a culture that seems to favor fast results and getting out quickly, we forget that real wealth is created by laying strong foundations and building the business over time.

The lesson to me is staying with a product/service long enough to learn about what works and do more of it. That's the magic.

I'm very grateful that Tara could make the time to share what she learned with us.

Every classic story about disruption follows a similar pattern -- well-oiled industry built around a "usual suspects" cast of characters building wealth on top of products created by others in a context of scarcity is disintermediated when someone develops the tools for producers to go direct.

4. So much so that it gives authors accessto the Nielsen BookScan sales data for printed books -- an advantage when available while marketing the book (and not six months later)

5. It provides a platform for direct transactions and interactions between authors and readers -- cutting out the middleman and passing on the savings to authors in higher advances and royalties

6. As Chris Anderson wrote in The Long Tail, Amazon is a platform that helps connect users with content -- there is value in findability, along with immediacy and accessibility

7. This is not just a cost conversation. Portability and convenience are often the name of the game and people who buy books, customers, end up dictating where the market is going -- the more Kindles and iPads in their hands, the more digital convergence

If you're a business or brand, why should you care beyond the fact that a digital entrant may dirsupt your industry?

Why should your business care?

You can learn a lot about the content people value from the titles they select and how they're purchasing it. Running a successful Website today means you're hosting information that solves problems for people.

On the editorial side of the web strategy of the future, immediacy or publishing content that is hyper relevant means knowing what to solve for and serve up, which is where search engine optimization (SEO) and content need to work together.

On the community side, accessibility also means providing a platform for industry insiders (B2B) and evangelists/advocates (B2C), starting with the experts and enthusiasts in your employ, to develop the hot topics and spread them among peers for discussion and reference.

The marketing part of is continuously building for what people want to do -- understanding signal, getting rid of the noise and friction, and making it super easy to say yes to buying.

Digital as a medium offers all kinds of opportunities to re-imagine your business brochure(s) and sales interactions, for example.

There's opportunity to re-invent how you conduct educational events by using follow up exclusive content. You keep the slide deck filled with emotional impact for the live event, craft the super useful guide to pull interest. Is it the first in a series like the Grande guides by Eloqua?

"The 21st Century author is an Internet entrepreneur," says Brian Clark who just unveiled Entreproducer, a project that could spark ideas for non-writers as well. -- digital publishing companies, marketing JVs, new platforms, and more.

+++

There are many advantages to businesses and brands that start building the ROI in the digital infrastructure itself.

First among them, the ability to justify an investment on content and inbound marketing, which in turn gives them an edge over competitors.

And one more thing -- keep your promises at all times. The cost to not doing that is trying to buy back confidence in you. Look around, where we are today is the result of not delivering.

"You know how you survive? You make people need you. You survive because you make them need what you have. And then they have nowhere else to go."

[Bill Gates]

Over the weekend, I watched Pirates of Silicon Valley, on the history of Apple and Microsoft (1999). At around minute 40 in the movie, Wyle/Jobs says, "for the first time in my life, people are coming to me, instead of me going to them."

That's a great feeling every entrepreneur and business owner who has felt it treasures -- knowing you have something people want.

How you survive, is by making things people need. In the movie, Gates says that a little after minute 46.

I watched as both, fictional Jobs and Gates, where identifying the need before even building the product. In fact, selling a product they technically didn't even have in their hands. The one thing they saw was what people wanted to do.

Building things for "ordinary" people

Working on offering something to the non technical or specialized professional is the challenge every nascent industry faces.

In the movie, that was the case with technology -- putting a computer on everyone's desk, in fact making it "personal".

The new creation didn't stop at the box itself and the programs needed for people to use the operating system. That was just the beginning.

After the first two components were in people's hands, the door was open for a whole ecosystem of other programs and tools to solve problems.

Desktops evolved into portable devices where trackpads replaced the mouse. Then touchscreens replaced the keyboard on smartphones and tablets. Evolving with use and anticipating new uses.

Building things for everyone was about taking away, simplifying the interaction to a very intuitive function -- touch (without sacrificing more sophisticated functions like video and sound). Why we are very attached to our new devices.

Are you building things for "ordinary" people?

+++

I'll leave you with one thing Wozniak says at the end of the movie, "it's weird, sometimes, you find things that are more important to you than the things you think are important."

This is the first of a series of conversations with Moore about business intelligence and data analysis. In this short post, I wanted to introduce you briefly and share the video of his TEDTalk, which I'm sure will inspire you to learn more about his work.

Moore got his start at a VC firm in NYC and got to analyze lots of data from successful technology companies. He got to see how the data was stored, and how they were processing information. And he got to solve problems by identifying where there were opportunities to do more.

The objective of starting RJMetrics was to replace his own job.

All that manual data analysis is how he came up with the idea of providing a product that could provide transactional businesses -- eCommerce, software as a service (SaaS) companies, gaming software companies, and social media -- in a very scalable way, the ability to do deep dive analysis of their own customer data.

Who are you selling to? Do you know who the most valuable people are among customers and how do you go about adding more people like that?

In coming weeks, I will publish more video segments of our conversation about using data to understand how people use your ecommerce site, how to segment customers, and how to figure out intent to buy from their digital body language.

We measure, quantify, and rely on best practices -- sometimes even in the face of clear evidence that things are not getting better, they're actually getting worse by using "proven" methods and failure to consider changing contexts.

Lists are not the only way to defy death.

Together with new found enthusiasm for data-driven decision-making, the faith we place in science alone lulls us into a false sense of security -- that we can find all the answers without formulating better questions.

Perception reigns supreme as our mental shortcuts and stories forever entertain us and hold us captive in an effort to explain what we have a hard time proving. Where there is no formula, we do our best with common threads.

Pfizer invested more than $1 billion in the development of the drug and $90 million to expand the factory that would manufacture the compound. Because scientists understood the individual steps of the cholesterol pathway at such a precise level, they assumed they also understood how it worked as a whole.

This assumption—that understanding a system’s constituent parts means we also understand the causes within the system—is not limited to the pharmaceutical industry or even to biology. It defines modern science. In general, we believe that the so-called problem of causation can be cured by more information, by our ceaseless accumulation of facts.

The truth is, our stories about causation are shadowed by all sorts of mental shortcuts, says Lehrer. Science is getting harder because in the complex networks at the center of life we deal with systems in which the variables cannot be isolated.

+++

Frog's Fabio Sergio says there's no real formula to innovation -- creativity comes from blending dissonant goals into radical harmony at FastCo Design. How do we see those common threads?

I don’t think there is an archetype for the people or processes that foster innovative thinking, or even what type of physical working environment can best support a creative culture. That view of the world is too polarized. In my experience, there is no single specific behavioral trait, methodological approach, or carefully selected set of contextual factors that guarantees success in the ability to think differently and translate that thinking into success in the market.

That said, there is indeed a common trait in the typical way creative thinkers approach challenges: They can comfortably hold opposing thoughts in their heads and get to work.

[...] Successful creative thinkers see opposites and apparently contradicting goals not just as a potential for dissonance, but as an opportunity for dynamic harmony.

As popular wisdom reinforces, the truth is usually somewhere in the middle, harnessing the positive tension between the extremes, and fine-tuning it.

+++

Christopher Butler curates views on forward-thinking design by reaching out to 7 designers at How. What skills do designers need now and what does the future hold? My pick for highlight from Nick Disabato:

By far, the most important thing is the people skills needed to work with clients and other team members. I was completely blindsided by this when I entered the working world, and made some very public and unpleasant mistakes as a result.

I was also unprepared for the speed that was needed to execute and iterate on an idea. If you aren’t generating many different potential solutions, you’re probably going to end up running down the wrong path, and you’ll end up creating a well-polished idea that ends up sucking. Kill your darlings in the name of a better product.

Most agree that user experience for mobile and tablets as well as the ability to scale projects for multiple contexts are in the future as well as the present of design.

+++

If the answers reside in better questions, how do we/do we need to stop looking for easy answers? Can design thinking help us see useful relationships?

I had the opportunity to sit down with Wil Reynolds and talk about his philosophy of leadership In the very fast growing, high tech organization he founded and leads -- SEER Interactive.

His Golden Rule for running the company is the same thing we learned in the Sandbox, as children:

"Always take the other person's interest into account."

He always wants to feel comfortable about the decisions he makes. Whether those decisions affect his team or his clients, he always wants to be able to put his head on the pillow at the end of the day and feel good about what he's putting out in the world.

It's the same principle you can apply to content. Ask yourself what people are looking for, and then write to that. The approach is the same with his team as it is with clients.

Clients work with SEER to grow their business. They may not necessarily know what they're looking for, at first. In working with clients, Reynolds looks to keep his promises at all times, and he instructs his team to do the same.

Working with Google, clients know that there will be changes in the search engine algorithm that make the work challenging.Yet, Reynolds feels that doesn't get him off the hook to deliver on his promises and the effort they planned to put forth on their behalf.

The team at SEER does all it can to work through the changes and if, despite the efforts, things don't work out, they hit pause with the client to gain a better understanding of what's going on. In other words, they stop billing until they figure stuff out.

Raynolds' passion about the integrity of his work comes across:

"There's something that has been lost over the years, which is you made a promise."

[...]

"I challenge everyone, from a business standpoint. Go do the same for your clients. I had clients who where paused. It doesn't happen often. But I had clients who were paused who referred three clients to us, even though we were not creating success for them. Because what we did spoke volumes about who we are."

Do the same thing. Wouldn't you want them to do the same for you?

This is one of the many reasons why I'm very excited the workshop will be held at SEER Interactive, where Reynolds will teach us about SEO and content. We look forward to working with you on April 19.

Many marketers have been shifting their ad budgets to digital media. The move usually comes as a way to also reduce spending by building efficiencies into the overall program.

According to a new survey of about 600 marketers, agencies, technologists and digital industry insiders, that ratio is $1-to-0.20. The survey was conducted by the Society of Digital Agencies in partnership with Econsultancy. [hat tip Greg Sterling]

Content development + measurement top list of needs

Some of the key findings, which SoDA included in their 2012 Report:

digital marketing spending continues to grow steadily

budgets are shifting from traditional to earned media

organizations continue to make investment in owned media

brands are integrating more compelling forms of storytelling: video, sponsorships, and branded content

there is also a shift in resources from relying heavily on agencies, to building competencies in house

While brands are revisiting the agency mix in search for greater accountability and support with content and measurement, agencies are looking to move upstream in the business strategy area.

Wearing the client side hat, getting the scope of work right, as well as recognizing the value and importance of planning and serendipity are critical to the relationship.

Getting the basics right

Recent major flops on the branding side -- for example, the Netflix/Qwikster fiasco, and Bank of America’s poorly executed plan to charge additional debit card fees [hat tip Katy Schamberger] -- flag the need to reinforce that getting the basics right is fundamental:

evaluate the business opportunity -- are there challenges you can address?

build on the existing brand value -- in the examples above, little thought was given to considering brand value and resonance

observe and listen to consumer behavior -- where are your consumers on the early to late adoption curve?

understand the cultural context -- social applications are ideal for delivering real time qualitative clues

The industries showing the most significant increase in digital marketing are retail, tourism, and financial services. This report is consisted with a recent Pew Research Center Study about Digital Advertising and News.

The report includes agency-authored articles and interviews with brand-side social media managers from Bloomber LP, Samsung, and The House of Remy Martin.

+++

Organizations are also starting to shift marketing departments to add the skills that are critical to their success in digital.

How is your organization rethinking the marketing department? Are you fitting in the pieces, or are you still buying spare parts?

The current view of the world of work is still organized around a “spare parts” mindset.

We treat people as spare parts, constantly looking for a new one when things don't go the way we hope and forecast. We have the models and we have the people. The focus on having the right people on the bus is distracting us from seeing the whole picture we want to build.

We're solving the wrong problem.

To succeed in the 21st Century, we are called to face and solve problems of increasing complexity. New competitive pressure we had not anticipated, easier solutions and friendlier services may take our business models by surprise and force drastic cost reductions at a time when we might need to build in new ways instead.

+

Moving from one feed to another, shiny object from shiny object, shifting from one need to another, constantly looking for new ideas, tips and tricks to become more efficient in search of that magic pill that will take us on top of the world squanders our cognitive abilities.

Five ways, four steps, three reasons, two tips, one trick ponies hoping to become unicorns, chasing hope and hype, both of which we might be able to sell fast enough to exit.

But learning by bullet point is risky. Simplifying only helps deconstruct information that is obvious, and not develop knowledge we can turn into usable data. For that we need to construct. To interact with complex concepts and the complexity of our environment, we need second order thinking, which then forms the basis of our knowledge.

Studying for the test

David Guterson, a high school teacher, and a homeschooling father of four, questions the validity of standard test-taking in school, which is meant to measure the quantity and quality of a student’s learning during a certain period of time.

My reaction was the test format needs revisiting —from multiple choice to essay. Create, don't repeat. When we study for the test, we miss developing our own thesis about a topic. Because the danger is that we think of what is not required as not mattering.

But it does matter, or we find ourselves unprepared to solve the complex problems we come across in business and life.

Spare parts and work

The 20th Century view of the world was to educate for and fill job roles based upon a set of narrowly defined criteria. Something like describe and find a nut, a bolt, or a hammer, then look for the right pegs to fit in the openings.

We need new metaphors and a new language to describe people in relationship to business models. People are an asset because we can trade relationships, and not because they are the “spare parts” we were looking for today. When we put the word “asset” with “people” this is typically what we mean.

Yet we would be pressed not to object to a “spare parts” view of work in the knowledge economy.

Organizations still identify, assess, recruit, and manage by spare parts. It's lazy and not appropriate for the complexity, and beauty, of 21st Century business.

ROI

Return depends on investment. Individuals who can assess, attract, and manage a company's knowledge and competence do so by developing, designing, and growing it to yield compounding effects. That's not done by filling a requisition, it's a process of uncovering opportunity.

Are we making the right investments or are we still thinking in terms of spare parts?

In a very warm follow up email, he reminded of a recent exchange we had for a story he was working on, and presented the reason why I was receiving the book.

I did take the time to read the whole book. Here's why:

it's well written -- clear language devoid of buzz terminology appeals to me

it's well researched -- beyond doing the homework, there is enough detail with each example to make the reader's job of seeing how they relate to the central thesis effortless

its fresh take -- culled from different facets of life and business, the examples use a fresh point of view and new information. In addition to P&G, Duhigg writes about Target and the Rhode Island Hospital, Starbucks, Pepsodent, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Indianapolis Colts, and Rosa Parks and the Saddleback Church

its immediate application to changing bad habits -- say, for example, that you want to stick with an exercise program, or a new nutritional diet, or learning a second language... the tools alone can do only so much

My take on Denning's review* is we keep revisiting the past because we're collectively hooked on proven success stories and models. I don't agree completely with Denning's suggested management book list, though it's a proven and accepted roster.

Indeed, it isn't rocket science, it's called building prosperity and confidence by making the best promises you can keep. Applied to Boards, this is called the Tunjic Offense and Mechanics, and you'll hear a lot more about it soon (both descriptive AND prescriptive).

To refresh your memory, the story goes when a sports agent has a moral epiphany and is fired for expressing it, he decides to put his new philosophy to the test as an independent with the only athlete who stays with him.

We say people matter, do we mean it?

A middle-aged brand consultant confesses that speaking as a consumer, I don’t believe the current “cultural model” driven by ubiquitous marketing is sustainable. Like many consumers I avoid marketing at all cost.

From wasteful packaging to drowing in consumer data without acting on what matters -- people -- and swimming in white noise, which is leading to the ever increasing search for what's next without enjoying what's now -- nor making it happen -- abundant choice is having the opposite effect -- conformity.

When all the stuff available exceeds our ability to vet it all, we turn to social cues to figure out what we should do. What's "in" wins.

Confronted with all the noise, entertainment is what sells.

It didn't happen overnight.

Now, marketers selective use of social technologies just as media channels has become consumers selective hearing. A better alternative is to be human in conversation and in the moment to get the most out of opportunities with social and other new technologies.

By the way, the statement in bold is not to be interpreted as dropping in with a spam egg on Twitter at the mere mention of a keyword.

say it better (and mean it) -- the inspiration for part of this post came from Tom Fishburne's what ads say cartoon

It will come from both, increasing the level of collaboration between corporations and social entrepreneurs motivated by a common desire to solve a pressing social problem, and increasing the quality of the content instead of increasing the media spend.

Conversation Agent

Conversation Agent focuses on business, technology, digital culture, and customer psychology. At Conversation Agent LLC, I help organizations and brands that want to build better customer experiences tell a new story.